The ‘Poetic Speaker’, ‘Inspired Creator’, AND ‘The Language of Common Men’.

1. The ‘Poetic Speaker’,‘Inspired Creator’,AND‘The Language of Common Men’. SOURCED:http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html By Laureane Estelle.

2. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet.

3. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded in any previous period. Paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components . The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist.

4. “Romantics preferred boldness…they promoted the conception of the artist as ‘inspired’ creator over that of the artist as ‘maker’ or technical master.

5. In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum. Although in both Germany and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live.

6. “Artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used "the language of commen men,” not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).”